y.
When they went out for a bath in the Thames,[14] they found that their
"Water-American" could swim like a fish; and he so astonished them
that a rich Londoner tried to persuade him to start a swimming-school
to teach his sons, but Franklin had stayed in England long enough,
and he now decided to go back to Philadelphia.

[Footnote 14: Thames (Tems). London is on the river Thames.]

116. Franklin sets up his newspaper; "sawdust pudding."--After his
return to America, Franklin labored so diligently that he was soon
able to set up a newspaper of his own. He tried to make it a good
one. But some people thought that he spoke his mind too freely. They
complained of this to him, and gave him to understand that if he did
not make his paper to please them, they would stop taking it or
advertising in it.

Franklin heard what they had to say, and then invited them all to
come and have supper with him. They went, expecting a feast, but they
found nothing on the table but two dishes of corn-meal mush and a
big pitcher of cold water. That kind of mush was then eaten only by
very poor people; and because it was yellow and coarse, it was
nicknamed "sawdust pudding."

[Illustration: FRANKLIN EATING "SAWDUST PUDDING."]

Franklin gave everybody a heaping plateful, and then, filling his
own, he made a hearty supper of it. The others tried to eat, but could
not. After Franklin had finished his supper, he looked up, and said
quietly, "My friends, any one who can live on 'sawdust pudding' and
cold water, as I can, does not need much help from others." After
that, no one went to the young printer with complaints about his paper.
Franklin, as we have seen,[15] had learned to stoop; but he certainly
did not mean to go stooping through life.

[Footnote 15: See paragraph 114.]

117. Franklin's plan of life; what he did for Philadelphia.--Not many
young men can see their own faults, but Franklin could. More than
that, he tried hard to get rid of them. He kept a little book in which
he wrote down his faults. If he wasted half an hour of time or a
shilling of money, or said anything that he had better not have said,
he wrote it down in his book. He carried that book in his pocket all
his life, and he studied it as a boy at school studies a hard lesson.
By it he learned three things,--first, to do the right thing; next,
to do it at the right time; last of all, to do it in the right way.

As he was never tired of helping himself to get